Advertising has played a central role in shaping the history of modern media. While often identified with American consumerism and the rise of the 'Information Society', motion picture advertising has been part of European visual culture since the late nineteenth century. With the global spread of ad agencies, moving image advertisements became a privileged cultural form to make people experience the qualities and uses of branded commodities, to articulate visions of a 'good life', and to incite social relationships. Abandoning a conventional delineation of fields by medium, country, or period, this book suggests a lateral view. It charts the audiovisual history of advertising by focussing on objects (products and services), screens (exhibition, programming, physical media), practices (production, marketing), and intermediaries (ad agencies). In this way, the book develops new historical, methodological, and theoretical perspectives.

What unleashed the forces of global capitalism which continue to shape today’s world? To solve this riddle economic historians usually point to the emergence of business-friendly values, the emergence of consumer markets and new forms of applied knowledge in early European modernity, which led to innovations in industrial organization, shipping, logistics and trade (which, among other things, enabled and were driven by the transatlantic slave trade). This book focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries and zooms in on the moving image as a factor of economic development and the history of global capitalism. In a series of in-depth cases studies at the intersection of film and media studies, science and technology studies and economic and social history, Films That Work Harder: The Circulations of Industrial Film presents an in-depth, global perspective on the dynamic relationship between film, industrial organization and economic development. Bringing together new research from leading scholars from Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, this book combines the state of the art in the field with an agenda for future research.

This book is specifically dedicated to film history’s own history: It provides insights into the fabrication of film histories and the discourses on their materials and methods in the past in order to better understand and reconsider film history today. The interventions unpack unspoken assumptions and hidden agendas that determine film historiography until today, also with the aim to act as a critical reflection on the potential future orientation of the field. The edited volume proposes a transnational, entangled and culturally diverse approach towards an archaeology of film history, while paying specific attention to persons, objects, infrastructures, regions, institutional fields and events hitherto overlooked. It explores past and ongoing processes of doing, undoing and redoing film history. Thereby, in a self-reflective gesture, it also draws attention to our own work as film historians.